They should do a series of rap songs, too. That rap is hip these days and the kids really like it. Nothing reaches young people like adults dressing up like characters and rapping! This won't turn young people off out of sheer repulsion at being patronized at all!

It has amazing sticking power:
The LHC-b sees where the antimatter's gone,
Alice looks at collisions of lead ions,
The CMS and Atlas are two of a kind,
They're looking for whatever particles they can find. ...

I think STEM is broad enough that it's difficult to make general statements.

CS is generally considered STEM. My wife and I had no problems finding jobs to put us in the top 10% of our area and pay off the college debt in a couple years. We're doing much better at this point in time than our friends with medical degrees (although I'm sure they will catch up).

Nearly every study I've seen shows STEM fields as some of the most consistent returns on investment for a college degree. Essentially only MBA's, Lawyers, and Doctors do better, and those are either a much higher up front cost, or are a strong tournament system (with the top people making out, and lots of people failing at the bottom).

No, you need actual job prospects for these STEM graduate students"What do the career prospects of a STEM Ph.D. look like? The typical career path is increasingly two post-docs following a Ph.D. before entering the labor market. That is, following a bachelor's degree and another four or five years of intensive study and low-wage labor in a professor's lab, the typical STEM Ph.D. can look forward to yet another six or eight years working at an average salary of $50,000 before they can compete for a regular j

Why would you cringe? Your suggestion is still a way to make it fun, just a different way. I think if it actually gets students interested it is the opposite of a gimmick. Sure sometimes you can look at practical applications, but whats wrong with talking about a zombie apocalypse to get students more interested in exponential modeling for example? Or having Darth Vader teach them the Pythagorean Theorem?

Basically, the way to get kids to remember stuff and want to learn stuff is to make it relevant to their real life. For example, to teach algebra, focus on personal finance, because most kids who are bored to death by "let's study exponential growth" are far more interested in "here's how to make more money". To teach physics or chemistry, a few controlled and safe explosions go a long way towards making kids interested.

I wonder how long it'll be before we get confused stories about scientists injecting students with stem cells in experiments to give super powers popping up on various anti-science sites along with a call to arms to stop to such horrific and unnatural practices.

I do the same kind of thing through my navy job... http://www.sciencebrothers.org/ [sciencebrothers.org]
Whacky Scientists though, not super heroes. I feel its kind of cheap to present STEM in a "fiction" way. Conflict of messages maybe?

I had someone that did something quite similar when I was in K-12, but we didn't call him a "superhero", we called them teachers, and they taught me many principles of science, in areas like Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Science.

What the hell are teachers doing in the classroom that someone coming in and essentially doing their job for them is considered "newsworthy"?